To what extent did opposition to Gorbachev from hard-line Communists inside the USSR cause economic and political instability in the years 1985-1991?

This essay received 37/45, AKA a high level 4. To have reached level 5 I would have needed to include more synoptic links between factors, which I have now included. I probably also need to include another point as well, but to be fair this question is tough.

To what extent did opposition to Gorbachev from hard-line Communists inside the USSR cause economic and political instability in the years 1985-1991?

                Following the brief leaderships of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev inherited the role of leader of the USSR, which was stagnating towards economic and political collapse. In an attempt to save the dying Union, he attempted reform in the form of his policies Perestroika, meaning restructuring in an economic and political sense, alongside glasnost, meaning openness. While this was supported by previous dissidents and some radicals, his policies were strongly opposed by the hard-line Communists. While this was a cause for the economic and political instability, it was neither the sole nor fundamental cause of instability. Both Gorbachev and the rise of Yeltsin must also be considered, as well as the fact that instability had been building up for years prior to Gorbachev’s premiership. Therefore, hard-line opposition wasn’t the ultimate cause of instability, rather it was an accumulation of factors.

                Hard-line opposition derived from a long tradition of the bureaucratic Party machine of resisting change, even when it was needed. This was not an immediate necessity in the Brezhnev years, thereby allowing his “Era of Conservatism” to be sustained, but when Gorbachev proposed new reform to save an ailing economy, conservatives like Ligachev that remained in the Party were ideologically committed to tried and trusted hard-line policies that had worked in a different economic landscape, leading them to conclude that they shouldn’t be changed. As Gorbachev tried to accelerate the economy via perestroika from 1985 to 1986-7, it failed. This was because the members of the Party elite, who dominated the ministries and planning agencies responsible for managing the economy, either didn’t overtly comply with his policy, or lied about production levels, causing inefficiency from bureaucracy. The results were disastrous. Despite ambitious targets to double national income by the year 2000, by April 1987, it had declined, and later in 1989, the Soviet budget deficit had increased from 3% in national income in 1985 to 14%. Existing economic instability continued, and early failure removed Gorbachev’s credibility as a reformer, making it even harder for him to bring about urgent reform shortly before collapse, creating further economic instability. Therefore in its early phase, perestroika failed to correct economic instability because of the bureaucratic obstructionism of hard-line communists, which had a long-term impact as the failure this opposition caused would undermine later phases of perestroika to correct economic instability, thus causing further suspicion and opposition.

                However, the fault for economic instability does not just lie with the conservative opposition. To an extent, the fault lies with Gorbachev himself, who had a limited understanding of economic policy, as well as its inconsistency. This was highlighted in his Law on State Enterprises as part of acceleration, which despite attempting to give enterprise managers more responsibility and accountability to make them self-managed entities, such enterprises were still subject to the State control of pricing and output policy. Despite the rhetoric of enterprise autonomy, this proved to be what would become known as one of Gorbachev’s many “slogans”; policies without substance. It failed to restructure the economy as promised, and because the extent of autonomy for enterprises remained ambiguous in his policy, this allowed the hard-line ministers to continue to assert their own control, continuing stagnation. Volkogonov referred to Gorbachev as “the last Leninist” because he didn’t show a long-standing commitment to reform, and even once the economy had hit crisis point in 1991, and the Shatalin Plan, which proposed to transform the economy to market-based within 500 days, was proposed to save the economy, Gorbachev rejected it for a compromise package that maintained the Soviet ways of economic management. His policy created space for the bureaucracy of hard-line Communist ministers to seethe through economic policy, and drag the economy down. It also frustrated the more radical Communists of the Party, and as Merridale notes, “the Party was not as conservative as depicted”, limiting the extent to which hard-line opposition played a role. Rather, Gorbachev’s inconsistent reform caused economic and political instability, because it provoked those who sought reform to support Gorbachev’s political rival, Boris Yeltsin.

                Yeltsin was the personal enemy of Gorbachev, but as opposed to coming from the hard-line of the Party, he was a radical. He became the first democratically-elected President of Russia, winning 57% of the popular vote, creating a system of dual power in Russia between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. But it was in August 1991 that Yeltsin’s power eclipsed Gorbachev’s when a group of hard-line Communists sought to oust Gorbachev in a coup. This was after Gorbachev had drafted a Union Treaty that would create a voluntary Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics. The conservatives feared they would lose important power bases as Republics gained their own sovereignty and could create their own laws that override USSR ones. One could argue that the hard-line Communists mounted a coup for they feared political instability in the USSR as Republics gained more autonomy, but in doing so they created further instability as Yeltsin opposed them, declaring the plotters to be traitors, and surmounting enough public support to succeed in ending the coup less than three days after it was launched. Gorbachev’s failure to give sufficient credit to Yeltsin for stopping the coup allowed Yeltsin to eclipse Gorbachev, and so on 23^rd August 1991 Yeltsin suspended the operations of the Communist Party in Russia, before the Supreme Soviet enacted this at an all-Union level. This created political instability, in that it fuelled nationalism within Republics once Communist leaders were no longer recognised in Moscow, and so their only way of surviving a political vacuum was to align themselves with nationalist movements in their host Republics. Some responsibility does rest on Yeltsin for this, because he sought more independence for Russia, but this was only possible because he was able to elevate his platform from the Coup, which was a form of opposition from hard-line Communists.

                However, the nationalities issue as a source of political instability was, as historian Laver notes, “a time-bomb waiting to explode”, and was simply not only a product of Yeltsin’s Russian politics. Republics like the Baltic States and the Ukraine had been seeking independence long before 1985, dating back even to the Stalin years. The Baltic States had been annexed by the USSR in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, and since then those who had lived the days of independence remembered them favourably. But this nationalism stayed under the surface from leader to leader, until in the atmosphere of Glasnost they were openly able to question the legality of the annexation, promoting public movements for independence, which Gorbachev must have acknowledged as a threat to have sent tanks in. But his hard-line politics worked counter-productively, only sparking more nationalist tension. Therefore, in terms of political instability in relation to the Baltic States, while the initial process of Gorbachev’s reform was like opening a can of worms of nationalist discontent that had been simmering for decades, his hard-line response only accelerated an already destabilising situation. Because of his radical political and economic reforms, it cannot be claimed that Gorbachev was a hard-line Communist himself, but rather the early opposition to perestroika from hard-line Communists and its subsequent failure caused him to adopt hard-line policies himself in order to appease both sides of the spectrum. But yet, in the case of nationalities, while the rise of Yeltsin that may be attributed to the opposition of hard-line communists, as well as Gorbachev’s poor decisions that were motivated by a desire to appease hard-line opposition may be viewed as the “final straw” of the nationalities, this is underpinned by the build-up of independence movements in the Republics that had existed since Stalin, and that political instability between Russia and her Republics was long-term. Nothing short-term rectified, nor could rectify this. As historian Ward highlights, “one man could not prevent this”.

                Therefore, while the opposition of hard-line Communists certainly had a part to play in accelerating political and economic instability, the fact was this was “accelerating”, and not “creating” instability. By the time of Gorbachev’s reform, it was too little, too late, and even if his economic policy had had more substance and consistency, it would have done little to save a dying economy that he had inherited from Brezhnev. The short-term economic failure and the rise of Yeltsin were caused by hard-line opposition, but this is overshadowed by the long-term instability that already existed within the USSR.